18 January, 2023
There's a lot of talking when someone asks what would be the best build for running Minecraft server in terms of hardware, but most of people wouldn't care enough to go into details… let's do that now.
With recent releases we can all agree AMD has came a long way but unfortunately since Minecraft server is still a single threaded application, that's what your bottleneck will be – most likely. With other words, the CPU that would perform the best would be the one with highest single thread score (and usually frequency).
For the most part that also means you're more or less limited to Intel CPUs. I saw a lot of people suggesting CPUs like i5 9400F and so on, but if you're really gonna host big server or just want experience without lag, you should at least look towards 9600k or 9900k, 10900k or 11900k and of course 10850k are also all good options. Basically you're looking for CPU that can hit 5GHz or so, the higher the better.
When it comes to server grade CPUs good choice would be Xeon E-2288G or something similar.
That's not to say Minecraft won't run on 9400F or even slower/older CPU but in most of cases you will see 1 thread maxed out and the rest of threads just idling, while your Minecraft server is lagging.
In terms of memory and storage, SSD is a good thing, mainly to reduce lag coming from loading world files. Memory… well, just be sure you have enough, 6GB or so for small servers, 16GB for medium servers and up to 20/32GB for large servers, tho you gotta consider the fact that you will probably max out CPU before memory.
So there you have it.